you're making an absolute judgment on the entire society

Show me where I did that.

makes your arbitrarily determined authority

Again, stop making shit up. There is no authority, but there is such a category as developed countries, which the US belongs to, who all legislate openly such that you can track trends, political movements, ideological shifts, legislation and make comparisons.

And if you can find someone who's job is to track those very things and measure them against each other who will happily assert that the US looks leftist compared to most other developed countries, by all means, please do point him or her out of to me. That would be a rare and welcome treat.

i didn't notice the "arbitrary society {XYZ} is the authoritative definitive determinant of ideology in the world against which all are judged" icon floating above your head

Probably because that never happened, so don't be too hard on yourself.

what international standards? saudi arabia? malaysia?

If you bothered to read a little further, you would have caught the "developed countries" part. HTH.

those are just arbitrary points, not Magical Authoritative Determinators of Ideology, Anointed By God, which you apparently believe for some ignorant reason

Assumes facts not in evidence. Thanks for the bad faith.

the truth is, every society has some who resist change, and some who accelerate it. the center is determined by the center of that society, at that time. and this center is always moving. and it is the only logically valid measure of center, left, and right. for that given society. at that given time

Hence why, currently, and for a a while now at least, the US has been regarded as more conservative than most other developed countries. You're not refuting any points with this.

if you really reached for some magical bullshit measure of ideology globally, rather than society-by-society (the only valid measure), then the usa is actually a moderate middle-of-the-road country

And if you actually bothered to read what's got you frothing so much, you'd find that nothing like that has actually happened. Best of luck.

By international standards, even the Democratic party is to the right on a lot of issues (mostly economic at this point) than the rest of the developed world.

Haven't checked out any polls lately, have we?

The percentage of Americans supporting same sex marriage has been above 50% for a while now.

Your IP traffic has been recorded, comrade.

LOL, like that is somehow remotely new.

How about the European Union?

Not a country. HTH.

What if Greece decided to leave an Germany attacked it?

WTF are you smoking?

It's not exactly the same, but the same premise.

"[It] ain't the same fuckin' ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same fuckin' sport!"

Its the whole reasons things are struck down all the time as 'void for vagueness.'

Sigh.

Definition needed for 'things' and citations definitely needed for "all the time" and "void for vagueness".

As an optimistic younger lad, I really thought most bigotry (in industrialized countries anyway) would at least be on death's doorstep by the time I was as well.

Sadly, learning anything about race relations in the US long ago crushed that timeline for me.

Oh well. All you can do is fight, right? Keep up the good work.

I see this with many of the older light airplanes. Types like the Cessna 150 and Piper Cub were designed when people weighed less, and it's difficult to get two 2015-size people plus a usable fuel load in either. There have been commercial plane crashes due to portly passengers (e.g. Air Midwest 5481).

I can fly a Cessna 152 solo with full fuel tanks, but if I have anybody in the plane with me I have to calculate how much fuel I can carry without being overweight. I can't do anything meaningful with a 150, and I'm not that heavy.

...laura

I've seen two quasi-startups go down the tubes from the inside.

One company had some very clever ideas, but were chronically incapable of making reliable hardware, or of making software that worked. They had no internal procedures to track what they were making, what it was supposed to do, or how they knew it worked. Too many releases were "we have to ship something to keep from losing what little credibility we still have".

Another company tried to reinvent itself after its prime business peaked and then started to implode. The idea we tried to develop wasn't commercially uninteresting, but we had major focus issues. What, exactly, do we want to do? Who is going to buy it? For how much? Having owned our old industry we weren't very good at competing with others in our new industry.

Both companies had issues with ineffectual leadership, flavour-of-the-month development, and business decisions made to help friends rather than make money. Both were broadsided by external developments that eventually rendered their products commercially irrelevant.

...laura

,i>nope, i'd say libertarians don't really care what other people do over there, it's their own rights they're concerned about. get your own house in order... and all that.

So, nothing to do with what GP was talking about then?

"Republicans want a huge military but they don't want to send it anywhere. The Democrats wants a small military and they want to send it everywhere."

That was a cute joke in the 90s. Sadly, recent history's kinda fucked that up, no?

moral equivalence libertarians.

FTFY

It's not just in the U.S.A.

In Canada we've just had a verdict in a supposedly homegrown terrorism case (do a search for the names Nuttal and Korody), but it's clear that the defendants only have a handful of brain cells between them (heroin will do that...), and the undercover cops had a major part in turning a couple of harmless losers who aren't quite sure what day it is in to a major threat to national security. Needless to say, their lawyer is going for entrapment.

Also needless to say, the media are going entirely with the government/party line...

...laura